Panora {#Watty2016}

Chapter 10: Michal Van Hurst

Far on the outskirts of Sighişoara, Romania

The king of vampires and leader of the Van Hurst coven was standing at his window on the second floor of his Victorian family home gazing at the hundred year old courtyard. The cobbles stones had long been replaced by smooth marble, a sign. In his hand he held a cup of hot steaming coffee, black, Jamaican, just as he like it. He sipped slowly savoring the bitter taste in an utterly relaxed posture, the total opposite of the state his of thoughts. Two very important things were on his mind.

Once again his beloved had managed to disappear off the face of the very planet. He was beginning to be weary of it all. How many centuries must he beg for her forgiveness before she would forgive his offence? She had been angry with him since they had met and not once did she allow him to touch her.

But the same couldn't be said for other men, he thought bitterly.

She ignored his love and had fallen in love with many, some human some not. He had killed them at the slightest hint of perusal.

His gaze lowered to the black liquid that filled his cup remembering the last time he killed one of her lovers. He was the thirteenth Duke of Rothwell, Hamilton was his name. He was a rake of the highest degree but one look at Michael's beloved and he was suddenly reformed. Michal's hands tightened around his mug as he remembered the way she had looked at the human. A look filled with the purest form of love. A look that he knew would never be directed at himself. He had killed Hamilton right in front of her, slitting his throat from ear to ear a smile playing around his lips as he heard the weak human choke on his own blood.

His glee all but vanished when he looked at his beloved and saw her expression. The look of horror and pain etched so deeply in her beautiful face as she looked down at the corps. Tears mared her face and a retching sound of despair left her lips. Her eyes then flickered to him and he had felt his heart constrict tightly at the withering look of pure, unadulterated hatred she gave him.

Pushing him roughly aside as if he was nothing, she ran to her lover's side weeping over his body and whispering words of love and sorrow. Michal had walked out and left them fully realizing that in act of barbarism had cost him any chance with her. Unlike the others she had truly love that the human, and this time she would hate him for eternity.

Relaxing his hand, he sighed. It couldn't be helped. The thought of her turning her affection to someone else consumed him with jealousy. But nothing would change, not anytime soon anyway. She would never forgive him for what he had done, the duke was the least of her grievances. It was pointless thinking of it.

The other matter occupying his mind was of greater importance. It seems that even though his brother's ash was in an urn in Cambodia, his legacy lived on. Reports were circulating of those retched abominations that his brother had created, the ones called taintbloods. One of the written laws was that vampire changelings were not allowed to change a human. Frankly, no one would try. The gruesome monsters that came out of such a detestable act was enough to prevent that from ever occurring. But his brother was a crazy mad man, and mad men were monsters themselves.

Purebloods like himself were the only ones that had the power of turning. His old man had lost his mother to vampire slayers during the early 1200s and driven by feelings of loneliness he turned to the arms of a fairly young vampire and sired Dereken.

But only the mate of a pureblood could give birth to a pure blood offspring. And his father's new woman was what was referred to as a changeling, a vampire changed by a pureblood. She became pregnant and when the child was born his brother Dereken was born a changeling.

That little difference between them had planted a bitter seed in Dereken's heart turning him into a vindictive, evil man with an unsustainable thirst for power.